Unitarian Universalist Meeting of
“The God Question and 100 Answers”
Grace Note: “Unitarian
Universalist Answers for What God is Not”
Rev. Kathy Duhon
Unitarian Universalist Answers for What
God Is Not
The previous President of the Unitarian Universalist Association, the Rev. John Buehrens, used to say something like this, “Tell me what kind of God you don’t believe in – I probably don’t believe in that kind of God either.” He is a theist, but he is pointing out that there are many understandings of God that miss the mark. Sometimes these are just simplistic. For example, I don’t know any Unitarian Universalists, nor very many adults of any religion, who believe that God is an old, white, bearded man in the sky. Sometimes, though, some very harmful beliefs about God abound and need to be denied, and Unitarian Univesalists have been strong in this area.
After
Hurricane Katrina devastated the
A
Earlier,
Rev. Victoria Safford, another UU minister, had written that some people responded
to the
Another of our ministers, Authur Foote, wrote more generally, “God is not a proposition to prove but a reality to experience; not something to define but to know in the mind’s commitment to truth, in the claims of justice, in the prevalence of beauty, and in the sanctities of love.”
God
is not what any one person decides to define as God, and we believe that the
actions and motivations that are ascribed to God are sometimes just plain cruel, and only human inventions, nothing to do with the
sacred. Unitarian Universalists deny
that God is mean. We don’t believe that
God is on the side of some and against others.
We also know that God is not ever simply what any one person or one
religion believes about God. What is God
‘not’ to you?
The God Question and 100 Answers
God as a topic – it’s a little unusual for us. We are unusual – Unitarian Universalists can believe in God, or not, or be undecided. We seek the truth. We question.
The God question is asked by believers, doubters, unbelievers. It’s actually a multi-part question. Is there a God? Who or What is God? What is God like? Why believe in God? Can I believe in God? If I believe in God, what does that mean for my life? If I don’t believe in God, what does that mean? Here are 100 answers, in alphabetical order. Some are just a name for God. Some are terse and some are lengthy quotes.
1) Abba. This means father, or Daddy, in Hebrew.
2) Access. Martin Buber talked about access: “All [of us] have access to God, but each has a different access. [Our] great chance lies precisely in [our] unlikeness. God’s all-inclusiveness manifests itself in the infinite multiplicity of the ways that lead to him, each of which is open to one [person].”
3) All existence. About the Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, Daniel Mott writes, “The essence of divinity is found in every single thing – nothing but it exists….Do not attribute duality to God. Let God be solely God….Do not say, “This is a stone and not God.” God forbid! Rather, all existence is God, and the stone is a thing pervaded by divinity.”
4) All in All – one of my favorite expressions for the divine.
5)
Alpha. The
first.
6) Ancient and Ageless Spirit – Time is elastic with God.
7) Awesome One.
8) Beloved – Christian, Moslem and Jewish mystics all use this intimate term.
9)
Beloved Belonging. One way of experiencing God.
10) Bountiful
One.
11) Breath of
Life, an ancient Hebrew understanding.
12) Buddha, who is supposedly not God, is sometimes revered in much the same way as God, and with the same belief that you can find a Buddha nature within, similar to a divine nature.
13) Cod – Some singers say cod for God so it can be better heard.
14)
Compassionate One.
15)
Dance of Life.
16) “God is Dead,” Friedrich Nietzsche famously wrote.
17) “God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity,” Dag Hammarskjold said, “but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illuminated by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.”
18)
Divine
19) Dog is God spelled backwards. I did find a Biblical reference to God being a dog. In Tobit chapter 11, verse 4, it says, “And the dog went along behind them.” In the note on that verse, it says, “Another ancient version reads “And the Lord went along behind them.”
20) Ein Sof – from the Kabbalistic understanding of God as Nothing, as All.
21)
Emptiness – Thomas Merton wrote, “God touches us with a touch that is
emptiness and empties us.”
22)
Empty. When asked why she fasted
for 24 hours for Yom Kippur, a woman answered, “You can’t grab God. You just have to become empty. Then God will have a space to enter.
23)
Energies of love. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote,
“Someday, after we have mastered the winds, the waves, the tides, and gravity,
we shall harness for God the energies of love. Then for the second time in the history of
the world, [we] will have discovered fire.”
24)
Eternal One.
25) Everything. In The Color Purple, Alice Walker had a character say this, “I believe God is everything….Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you’ve found It.”
26)
Father.
27) Gentle
Truth – a name Catherine of Siena called God.
28) Gift of Love.
29) Giving up
on God. UU minister, Rev. David Bumbaugh wrote, “Having given up God, I now find the
holy everywhere: in deep joy and
inexpressible pain, in sudden delight and unfathomable sorrow. The world, for me, has become full of
holiness.”
30) Giver. Rabindranath Tagore said, “God the great giver, can open the whole universe to our gaze in the narrow space of a single lane.”
31) “Anyone who gives
anything to the Divine will find that it comes back to them turned to
gold.” Rumi
32) Glorious
One.
33) God is
a circle whose circumference is nowhere and whose center is everywhere,” wrote
15th century philosopher Nicholas of Cusa.
34) God of
Mercy.
35) God of
Wonder.
36) Goddess.
37) Goodness.
38) Grace. Brother Lawrence wrote, “when [God] finds a soul imbued with a living faith, He pours into it His graces in abundance. It is like a torrent forcibly diverted from its usual course which, having found a passage pours through irresistibly in an overwhelming flood.”
39) Gracious
God.
40) Grandfather.
41) Grandmother.
42) Great
Spirit.
43) Ground of
Being. Paul Tillich
called God this, the structure of everything that exists. Our UU James Luther Adams said that Tillich was the Pope to the heretics.
44) Heavenly
Father.
45) Heavenly
One.
46) “Here I am,
Lord, send me”, said Isaiah.
47) Holy of
Holies.
48) Holy One of
Ages.
49) Holy Sanctamataba. (I
have no idea what this means or where I found it, but it sounds good.)
50) Holy
Spirit.
51) Holy
Wisdom.
52) Hope.
53) Hunger. Father Timothy Radcliffe, a priest who served people during the Rwandan genocide, said, “The deepest truth of our human nature is not that we are greedy and selfish but that we hunger and thirst for God, and in God will find each other.”
54) I am what I
am. The name God told Moses.
55) I-Thou. Martin Buber’s
wisdom about the relationship with God.
56) Jesus.
57) Here is a joke
about God, one of many. What we can joke
about we usually care about. “A
scientist wanted to find out once and for all if there was a God, so he built
the most powerful computer ever and he accessed all imaginable data banks, all
the libraries of the world, science institutes, universities, and scanned in
every published book since the invention of the printing press. Finally, he sat down at his keyboard and
typed the question, “Is there a God?”
And the computer said, ‘There is now.’”
58) Joy.
59) Kali. Hindu goddess.
60) Knowable. “The anonymous medieval mystic who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing tells us that ‘all rational beings possess two faculties, the power of knowing and the power of loving. To the first, to the intellect, God who made them is forever unknowable, but to the second, to love, he is completely knowable, and that by every separate individual.” [Philip Simmons]
61) Love. Thomas Merton said, “because we love, God is present.” [Kathleen Norris]
62) Mammon. Jesus said you cannot serve God and mammon,
which is the material world, especially of possessions.
63) Meaningful
Peace. A way of
experiencing God.
64) Miracle of
Miracles.
65) Mother. Mother of All.
66) Mystery. Universalist minister A. J. Mattill wrote, “‘God’ is my heart’s name for the mystery of
the universe.”
67) Nameless
One of Many Names.
68)
69) Omega. The last, the be-all,
end-all.
70) One.
71) Peace.
72) Perceive. Many years ago I wrote this in my journal, “I know that there is God, but what this fully means I don’t know. I perceive God in the current of life, in the meaningfulness and spiritedness, in the sense of communion with others and with the Ultimate other. Transcendent and immanent. I see God many places, in many ways, and I also trip over the conception of God.”
73) Point. Dame Julian of Norwich wrote pointedly, to
the point, “I saw God in a Point.”
74) Power. Martin Luther King, Jr., in an offhand reference in an essay on nonviolence, wrote, “…[A]s a Christian I believe that there is a creative personal power in this universe who is the ground and essence of all reality – a power that cannot be explained in materialistic terms.”
75) “Do the thing and you will have the Power,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson.
76) Protector.
77) Queen of
Heaven.
78) Redeemer.
79) Sacred One.
80) Self. “It is Thomas Merton who writes that when we find God we find our true self and when we find our true self we find God.” [Joyce Rupp]
81) Soul of the world. “That which oppresses me, is it my soul trying to come out in the open, or the soul of the world knocking at my heart for its entrance?” wrote Rabindranath Tagore.
82) Source. Philip Simmons wrote, “And in touching emptiness we touch the source, the spring, the creative power out of which the universe flows at every moment. That source has many names, but I call it God.”
83) Source of All.
84) Source of
Hope.
85)
Source of Joy.
86) Source of
Life.
87) Spirit of
Life.
88) Spirit of Love.
89)
Spirits, Saints and Sages – where divine power is located.
90) Transforming
Joy – a way of experiencing God.
91) Truth. Gandhi called God this, and also said of Jesus, “To me he is the truth.” [Lanza del Vasta]
92) Universal
93) Vision. In her vision of God, Mechtild of Magdeburg wrote, “Of the heavenly things God has shown me, I can speak but a little word, no more than a honeybee can carry away of its foot from an overflowing jar. [Kathleen Norris]
94) Voice. Brother Richard at the Weston Priory wrote, “So many today have the hubris to make social, political and religious judgments claiming as their own voice the voice of God, and they fail to see that God is really speaking in the gentle whispers of people so easily overlooked and cast aside in our world.”
95)
Way.
96) Wholeness.
97) Wisdom.
98) Wondrous
One.
99) Yahweh.
100)
Zen.
One hundred
answers is hardly enough when it comes to God. In truth, we can only answer the God question
individually, and there is no single answer, let alone “right” answer. I say:
enjoy the questions, live the questions, and seek the answers to the
questions that life is asking you. So
may we be blessed.